


stalker.

by meritmut



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Body Horror, Captivity, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Implied/Referenced Character Death, Obsessive Behavior, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Post-Canon, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-02
Updated: 2019-08-11
Packaged: 2020-06-03 00:19:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 8,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19452496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meritmut/pseuds/meritmut
Summary: He can afford to be patient with her, now: he’ll help her see her that she has nothing to fear from him.





	1. the eternal fool.

**Author's Note:**

> I will be your shadow;  
> I will follow you,  
> Never let you go  
> — iamx, 'stalker'

When all that’s left of the corpse is ash he has it vented into hyperspace, nothing to signify the old man ever existed but a smear of dust between the walls of the universe.

The _Supremacy_ is a starborne citadel, a newly-minted nation in its own right, and carries a population to match. The disposal of the dead is no small consideration, therefore: as with most fleets, there is an entire office assigned to its oversight. Meaning—

 _Meaning,_ in essence, that Kylo does not need to heave the bisected body into the incinerator with his own hands, nor to watch unflinching as the sapphire blur of hyperspace takes the ashes, but it is done and over with before his mind has fully caught up to his actions and it feels…important, somehow, that he bear witness to Snoke’s passing.

Necessary. As if, unless he watches the creature meet oblivion with his own eyes, he will never be able to believe that he is gone.

And afterwards? When the void has claimed even the dust and the wound in Kylo’s mind bleeds freely, and a low buzzing fills his ears like the wings of a billion insects till he thinks he will go mad from it—what then?

Freedom, which demands a new face: a new mask forged of ore recovered from the debris fields of Alderaan. It is heavy and uncomfortable, as crowns should be, and when the hermetic seal entombs him in darkness he can never forget the weight of generations on his shoulders.

Sakhmes Ren had retrieved the twisted relic with her own scarred hands and pressed it into Kylo’s shaking grasp without a word. The lump of scavenged metal was warm where her fingers clutched it, but it is not so easy to steal from death and even as he gripped it the cold seemed to come creeping back in.

The bond between the knights runs deeper than any oath, yet sending Sakhmes was not a question of trust—even if she wanted to betray the truth of her errand, Snoke had her tongue torn out years ago.

Kylo had been the one to staunch the bleeding then. It’s hard to envision his hands performing such a gentle act now: something inside him snapped the moment his mother passed into the Force, the last and final bond of blood severed, and in its place rose a fire of rage and grief that burned and burned until there was nothing left inside him to consume.

Once that inferno turns outward it annihilates everything in its path.

(Everything, except for Rey. She eludes him like a shadow, like the answer to a riddle in a half-forgotten tongue; like a dream in the first light of dawn she is ever just beyond his reach.)

**

She is lonely.

He can feel her, that strange presence in the back of his head pushing at the bond with one hand while she shuts him out with the other, the endless ebb and flow of her sadness and heartache and confusion against the shores of his psyche. When he goes still, when he quiets his mind and listens for her it is like looking into his own image in dark glass: she reflects him even here, even now, when the gulf between them feels wider than ever.

It is no wider than the space between him and every other living person, and he knows she feels the same way. He can sense this too; the impossible distance, the way no matter how hard she tries she feels marked, in some indelible way, by her past. _Outsider. Junkrat. Unwanted._

He knows what it is to be marked out as different. He has always been the oddity, the piece that never fit.

He’d thought she had seen that. He’d thought...hoped...that she might have understood. But in the end she had been just like the others.

It’s not her fault, though. She had been afraid—Kylo understands fear well enough. She'd been hesitant to let go of everything she was, everything that had held her back for so long; she had clung to her sad dreams for so many years that she scarcely knew how to exist without them.

And then she had let _them_ fill her head with stories, until there was no room left for him or the truth.

It will be alright if he can just speak to her again. He is sure of it, that he can make her understand.

 _I’ll find you,_ he promises the restless ghost in his dreams. _I’ll make things right._

The ghost does not answer.

**

The storm inside him hits fever pitch, the buzzing in his head rising to a ragged shriek like his skull is lined with broken glass and Kylo can barely hear—barely even _think_ —through the pounding of the blood in his ears, but after scouring the galaxy for any trace of her, hunting her to the very edge of known space, with nowhere else to run Rey turns and finally meets him head-on.

Everything else might be burning but facing him down, a snarl on her face and her saber’s twin spears blazing in defiance, she is the only thing the fire cannot touch.

This is where the Stormtroopers come in.

She could cut through them in seconds to make her escape but she is too good to paint her blade with so much blood and this is how he takes her a second time.

(He does not count the time before, when she came to him of her own will. That hour is set apart in his memory, as something precious and rare, and by need distinct from what came after. Still—he hopes, he _believes,_ that one day she might again.)

**

They warn him to sever her connection to the Force, or else host a living, lethal and very _angry_ weapon aboard his flagship, but even the thought turns Kylo’s stomach. Those who lack the sensitivity will never understand that to meddle with the Force in such a way would go beyond the irreverent, beyond even blasphemy—to butcher another being’s connection to the universe would be nothing less than sacrilege, an act of profanity against the cosmic order that could never be forgiven.

Until she leaves him no other choice, he cannot bring himself to countenance it.

Still he’s no fool, no matter what they say when they think he cannot hear them. Rey is too dangerous to be left free. She will be held, therefore, in a place where even the Force is of no aid to her, and when eventually she comes to see clearly the future he is building for the galaxy—and to recognise her place in it—she will not need to be _held_ anywhere.

She’ll fight till then, of course she will, because the fight all she knows and she never had anyone to trust in order to learn how. He can afford to be patient with her, now: however long it takes, no matter how hard the road ahead may be, he’ll help her see her that she has nothing to fear from him.

As long as she is with him, she will never need to be afraid again.

And this way, she’ll be safe. There are those on his own governing council who would sooner put a bolt in her skull than breathe the same air as she, to say nothing of the Outer Rim scum who’d be all too happy to collect the last Jedi’s head. Enemies surround him, narrow minds masking their treachery behind sycophancy and traditionalism and there isn’t a soul aboard this ship he would trust to spit on him if he were burning, never mind to stand and fight beside him.

Not like she did.

So this is how he will repay her: he will protect her from those around him and those who hunt her in his name, from all of those who would do her harm.

And if it comes to it, he’ll protect her from herself.

**


	2. I am here.

Sakhmes’ eyes follow him down the corridor toward the cell, her judgement palpable even from beneath the narrow aspect of her mask. Her disapproval settles like a weight on the back of Kylo’s neck when he moves past her, reaching for the access panel to thumb in the code that only they two know.

She says nothing, of course, but even before her mutilation she had known how to wield silence like a blade. Kylo doesn’t need to be able to see her face, or hear her stolen voice, to feel its sting now.

“Don’t,” he mutters under his breath, his own helmet’s vocoder transforming the warning into a garbled rumble.

Over his shoulder, he hears the distinct sound of a snort.

**

Rey’s claimed the cell’s small bunk and is sat cross-legged upon it, giving her best impression of deep and untroubled meditation: eyes closed, her breathing even and her hands resting palm-up on her knees, she is the very picture of serenity.

The pane of reinforced transparisteel that divides them is not enough to suppress whatever pull she has on him. She draws him in without a word, without even a _glance;_ the impossible lure he has never known how to resist.

She must be able to sense him but she gives no sign of it, implacable as a stone in the river-bed that never bows before the current. Kylo can feel her, though, and when he reaches out with that other sense the sheer _ferocity_ of her anger nearly robs him of breath.

The movement of his mind over hers is like passing his bare hand above a flame—the flicker of _danger,_ of coming within a hair’s breadth of an inferno, the animal, atavistic certainty that if he were only to reach a little further he would burn.

Not so serene, then.

She had looked peaceful that first time, too, when he watched her while she slept. Little had he known she wears a better mask than he.

Her name slips out of his mouth before he can stop it but even to Kylo’s own ears it’s barely more than a growl. Those avian eyes open and fix on him, gripping him in place though her expression doesn’t change.

The wrongness of watching her from the other side of a prison door curdles in his gut like bile. This isn’t how things were supposed to be.

None of this is how things should have been. Something had gone wrong, somewhere, a tangle in the weft of Fate’s design. It is the Force's will that it be set to rights.

 _Fix this,_ he commands himself. _Make it right._

At length, something that might be annoyance flits across Rey’s face. She draws herself upright, tilts her chin to face him with a stubborn courage that’s achingly familiar.

Her words knock the wind out of him all over again.

“You might as well kill me now.”

Kylo gapes at her.

Rey glares back, unflinching.

She means it, he realises. She really thinks he would.

That he _could._

He could no sooner swallow the nearest star and hold it inside himself than he could be the one to steal her light from the world.

His tongue trips over admitting as much, though.

“You are no use to me dead.”

“What use am I to you now?” The mulish scowl on her face is replaced, slowly, by a look of dawning understanding. Her mouth twists. “You think they’ll come for me.”

How very devious she must believe him. As if, Kylo thinks dryly, he spares a single fleeting thought for her Resistance friends when his generals aren’t badgering him to eradicate them.

“I know they won’t.” He does not mean it for a barb, but it’s clear from the pain that flares brightly through her eyes that his words cut deeper than intended. He clarifies: “they would have to find you first. I assure you they won’t.”

“They did once.”

“That was then.”

Rey turns her head away, her features hardening. “You’re wasting your time. They won’t come. And you won’t get anything out of me.”

“As you say. It doesn’t matter.”

“So what do you want with me?”

“Nothing.”

Her jaw clenches in frustration.

Then—

“How did you find me?”

Kylo blinks, startled by the abrupt shift in her tone. From sounding as if she’d like very much to punch his lights out a moment ago she now sounds almost—conversational.

“I followed the stories.”

She levels him a sour look.

“I did,” he insists quietly.

The rumours, the whispers that follow their kind like flies. Rey has gathered her own legend in the short time she has existed in the known galaxy. She is so new: she burns so brightly. Who wouldn’t be drawn to her?

Who wouldn’t abandon reason to chase her blazing wake across the sky?

“What stories?” Ah—she is curious. Not quite vanity that asks, but something else—a self-deprecating kind of inquisitiveness, the kind that wants to laugh at itself. She is testing him.

_Flatter me. Go on, I dare you._

There’s nothing he could say that wouldn’t fall short.

Instead, he crosses the room in a few quick strides, and slowly—his head tilted down, so he will not look her in the eye and lose his courage—removes his helmet. It just about fits on the low shelf below the window; the one that separates them, lets him watch her like a beast in a cage.

Rey eyes it with thinly-veiled distaste.

“They call you the new Jedi,” he tells her simply. “Or the last. I have heard some of them call you _Skywalker.”_

Her eyebrows rise incredulously. “Stars help me. That would be just my luck.”

Well, thinks Kylo wryly. It’s definitely been his.

“And then there’s the ones that call you a witch. Or an assassin, who stole her way into the Supreme Leader’s own chamber and slit his throat while he slept.”

“Oh, I like that one.” She pins him with her stare again. “Is that what you told them?”

_More or less._

“Not exactly.”

“You must have told them something, for an entire squadron of ‘troopers to tremble at the sight of me.” A dark, knowing grin slides across her face. “I don’t think you told them the truth, did you?”

“Did you?”

 _Touché_.

Instead of the glower he expects, she surprises him yet again. “Yeah, that would go down well. I don’t need more people telling me what a naïve little fool I am.”

The silence that follows is more uncertain than uncomfortable—on Kylo’s end, anyway, the right thing to say eluding him and Rey once again concealing her true feelings, but after a few moments’ quiet she looks up at him again.

“What else do the stories say?”

“Some of them are afraid of you.”

That touches a nerve. Rey flinches, a little, her hands curling into fists in her lap.

“It’s just how they are,” he assures her softly, moving closer to the viewport as if he could reach through the glass to soothe her. “They’ll always be afraid. Because we’re different. And they can never understand that.”

Fear travels more swiftly than hope. Soon the whispers that led Kylo to her had taken a darker turn, laced with the misgivings and fears of those who would never understand the Force and so could never understand _her,_ until it seemed he did not pursue a human woman but some blood-streaked, nightmare-birthed monster.

However false they rang in his ears, the stories made following the Resistance child’s play.

“What do you want with me?” Rey repeats, her voice barely a hoarse murmur.

“Nothing.”

“Then let me _go.”_ Surging to her feet, she staggers across the cell and flattens her hands against the glass, beseeching him with stark eyes. “Ben. Let me go.”

Kylo regrets, suddenly, discarding the mask, which might have hidden the tremor in his voice. “I can’t.”

“You _can.”_

He wants to. He wants to free her, safe in the knowledge that she’ll take his hand and _stay_ this time. He wants to do a lot of things—to reach for her, to cover her palm with his and discover all the ways their shapes are made to fit.

“No.”

“Why?”

“They’ll kill you. They want you dead.”

“Who?” Frustration and bewilderment war in her gaze. _“Who,_ Ben?”

 _Them,_ he wants to say. _Everyone outside this room. Everyone aboard this ship who is not you or I._

_If I let you go, you won’t be safe._

“Don’t be afraid,” he tells her instead. “You won’t be in here for much longer. Just—trust me. Please.”

Defiance, beautiful and brave, sparks in her face. “Why should I?”

He hopes that wild, flinty spirit will survive.

“Because you don't have a choice.”

**

Sakhmes hasn’t moved from her post opposite the door. Nor has she removed her helmet, and the dark pane of her visor presents a distorted vision of his own bare face as Kylo emerges from the cell.

Shoving his own mask back on now would feel like giving in to that unreadable visage, so he elects to make his escape with as much dignity as he can scrape together and leave his sister-in-arms to her mute vigil.

He is the Supreme Leader. He has duties to attend to, plans to put into motion. He has come too far to be waylaid by doubt now.

“If you have something to say, now would be an ideal time to keep it to yourself.”

Sakhmes is more than capable of making her opinions known without a word spoken, but for now, at least, she lets him go.

**


	3. self-loathing and high hopes.

“What is this place?”

He had been trying, vainly, to pretend like he hadn't noticed her, but the reluctant wonder in her voice encourages Kylo to move forward, giving in to the magnetism that affects him on a molecular level and beckons his very atoms _closer, closer_.

Neither sullen hostility nor blistering defiance, her mood today is already more than he’d hoped for.

Every day is something of a gamble when it comes to Rey’s temperament. Some days she is quiet, filled with a tearful melancholy that tugs at his heart; other days it’s less tears than venom.

He prefers the venom, he thinks. He can bear her rage unflinching, but her pain—

Clasping his hands behind his back in case the impulse seizes him to do something mad, like reach out to her, he keeps these scant few feet between them like a shield.

(Shield against his own idiocy, maybe. He hasn’t been able to think straight in Rey’s presence since the moment he first heard of her, and there’s no reason to expect that will change.)

The air in the room changed when he saw her standing by the viewport: it feels charged, staticky with an uncomfortable tension. Under his robes his skin prickles the way it would for days after one of Snoke’s _chastisements._

Kylo shivers. Old wounds itch at the memory, branded into his psyche though the flesh has long since healed; Force-lightning can wreak permanent damage on the body and nervous system, but it does not scar the way blades, whips and lightsabers do.

(Perhaps for that reason his master favoured it, sadistic though he was: ever conscious of appearances, Snoke preferred his punishments not to leave a mark.)

_He’s dead. You killed him. He’s dead._

“You’ll be safe here,” blurts Kylo, forcing himself from the claws of the past.

“That’s not what I asked.”

“Does it matter, where we are?”

He knows immediately it is the wrong thing to say. Rey’s nostrils flare delicately with annoyance, her jaw clenching so hard the tendons in her neck press up through her skin like tenacious roots. Instinct warns him to beat a hasty retreat, or else stay and try to soothe the rancour before it bites his head off.

Better face the storm now than let it simmer.

“Rey,” he entreats as gently as he can. “I mean it. You’ll be safe here. Safer than you would’ve been on the ship.”

That they are no longer aboard the destroyer is an admission of its own, and he watches her store away the detail for later examination. He has no doubt that she plots her escape when left to her own devices—she won’t sit quietly for long, however subdued she seems now; she learnt young to bide her time, to make each move with some future end in mind to safeguard her own survival, and Kylo isn’t fool enough to mistake her lack of open aggression for surrender.

Not that her surrender is what he seeks. If he wanted something as crude as _compliance_ from her he could take it, in theory, though the Force knows he had tried and failed to do as much on Starkiller and since then she’s only grown more confident in her power. To break her truly, to crush her mind and spirit the way he’s done countless others…every part of him rebels at the thought.

That spirit, that bright indomitable flame, is who she _is._ Her stubborn resilience, her endless ability to steal his breath and make his heart race, to knock his world off its axis and realign his entire universe without even trying; her strength and her intellect, her dark wit and her _infuriating_ righteousness…even if he could bring himself to destroy that—even if she weren’t more than capable of fighting back—he never _would._

“How am I safe?” Rey looks baffled. “I’m a prisoner.”

“No. You’re—”

“If you say I’m your _guest_ I’m going to put my foot down your throat.”

He doesn’t for a second doubt it.

Time for a new approach.

“You know...you’re being hunted,” he tries again. “That you have enemies.”

Her expression sharpens. “So?”

“They won’t find you here. No one will. Rey—” His voice takes on an imploring edge. “You know I won't hurt you.”

The lost look in her eyes makes her look years younger. “But you’re _imprisoning_ me,” she insists hoarsely, glancing around them at the new quarters he's had her moved to. They're not far from his, he knows, and the prospect from her window must be more or less the same—a far cry from the dark, suffocating confines of a high security detention wing, the orbital station offers spellbinding views of a grey-green world far below, cloud-banks a thousand miles across swirling over its surface glistening silver in the light of the rising sun.

It is a cell, still, but a view and some distance from the fleet are the closest to freedom he can give.

It seems blindingly obvious now that Rey does not see it this way.

 _“You_ set the hunters on me,” she goes on, pressing into his space and all he can do is _stand there_ like he’s the one held captive by the terrible, wounded accusation in her eyes. _“You_ stole me. _You’re_ my enemy.”

The declaration hits him like a blow.

_“No.”_

“What else do you call this?” She flings one hand out in a gesture that encompasses their surroundings, four walls and the endless expanse beyond the window which seems to taunt with the impassable distance between them and the next living soul. “You tried to kill me, Ben.”

“I—”

“You marked me as _bounty.”_

 _“No,”_ he’s floundering. “It wasn’t like that.”

“You chased me down like a _dog.”_

_“Stop—”_

“Why?” Her voice cracks, wavering. She swallows. “I’m stuck here, _alone_ —”

A new thought seems to hit her and she cocks her head, brow furrowed and eyes too bright. “Are you punishing me?”

“What?”

“Is this…” She swallows again like there’s something caught in her throat. “Is this revenge?”

_“What?”_

“I’m trying to understand.” Rey sounds oddly small and very uncertain as she moves away from him to his—her—window, drawn irresistibly to the dreamlike world far below.

His mind stumbles over itself, caught on the sight of her facing away from him.

There is trust in turning her back on him, isn’t there? She must believe him in some small way, must _know_ in her heart that he won’t hurt her, to put her unprotected back to him like this.

Maybe...maybe all is not so hopeless.

Hesitantly he takes a step towards her. Then, when she doesn’t react, another, and another until they are as close as they’ve ever been, as close as they were in the lift aboard the _Supremacy_.

She had been the one to take the step then, he recalls. She had crossed the entire galaxy to be with him.

Then it had all gone wrong.

But she isn’t lost yet.

_Fix it._

“I swear,” he tells her, studying the fine lines of her profile limned in eburnean worldlight. “I will never let anything happen to you. I’ll never let anyone hurt you.”

Rey’s eyes close, a shuddering breath escaping her. Perhaps it’s only the station's harsher lighting but she seems pale, her features drawn and tired, her skin lacking its familiar golden lustre. Her eyes are ringed with exhaustion but his hands and mouth still want to learn the shape of every inch of her, and Kylo’s breath hitches as her lips part, a rose in trembling, nascent bloom.

But whatever she had been about to say dies on her tongue. Her shoulders slump.

What comes instead rings hollow with defeat.

“You told me not to be afraid, the first time you took me.”

He remembers.

“I thought you were mocking me.”

“Never. I meant it. You never have to be afraid again.”

“Because you’ll never let me out of here again.”

“No—I will, I swear it. It’s just...”

“...just?”

“I know…” Kylo hesitates, feels another part of himself split open, Rey and her eyes flaying away whatever armour he’d had left until all that remains is the truth. “I know you won’t stay.”

If he can just get her to listen, he thinks. She had listened when it was just the two of them, no room for deceit between their bared souls, and it will be thus again—he just has to be patient and she’ll remember that no one knows her like he does, no one sees her heart and her mind, her fierceness and her sorrow and her potential: that no one can help her find the knowledge and the _belonging_ she craves but him, and then—then there will be nothing in their way.

Then she’ll stay.

“I didn’t know what else to do.”

Rey is quiet for a very long time after this.

Then—

“Tell me about the planet.”

She’s going to give him whiplash if she carries on like this.

“What about it?”

“Anything.”

“It is Mimban.” Casting about for what little knows of the world adrift below them, Kylo grips one hand hard enough to bruise with the other has his father’s voice stirs in his memory, the reckless storyteller’s charm in Han’s cadence as he recounted adventures from his youth. “Mostly woodland and swamps.”

“Why did you choose it?”

“The Empire had a presence here.”

“Oh. So the First Order’s there now?”

“No. It is abandoned, but for a surface outpost.”

“Can I go down there, then?”

He can only imagine how easy it would be to lose her in the tangled, mist-drenched jungles planetside.

She would slip away from him like a ghost, like a dream in the morning light, and with a whole world in which to disappear there would be no chance of ever finding her. He would be alone again.

Alone. Left behind, rejected by her and everyone who was ever meant to love him, because that’s the truth, isn’t it—that no one could?

No one loves a monster.

Not even the ones who made him.

**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> splitting this one in two because...sleep....


	4. the signs.

A strange sound pulls Kylo out of his reverie; a low, muffled gurgling that seems to emanate from below and between their bodies. It takes him a few baffled seconds to locate the source.

Rey’s stomach is rumbling.

He glances up at her, startled, but she won’t meet his eyes.

“You’re hungry?”

“No.”

He doesn’t mean to give her the Look, the one he learned at his mother’s knee and always worked on him, _always,_ but he does it without thinking and somehow the borrowed Organa glare seems to work on Rey, too.

Thinking of his mother is like looking over the edge of the abyss. Kylo teeters on the precipice, the dark dizzying gravity of grief and pain and complete, consuming _aloneness_ tugging him inexorably towards the brink.

Rey exhales sharply through her nose, her mouth twisted in a grimace both sardonic and…oddly embarrassed?

“Always,” she confesses quietly.

The thin place between their minds is like that too—a beckoning abyss. Hunger is her constant, the cosmic background radiation to the universe of her: it surrounds her, it pulses out from her, hunger and yearning and such sadness Kylo feels it like a hollow space inside his chest; like a rotten tooth, a gnawing and exquisite agony he cannot help but prod at till it bleeds.

_Starving. Wasting. Skin and bone stretched over emptiness and hungry so hungry—_

He resists the urge to take her by the arms and _make_ her look at him, as if by locking eyes with her he could see through her defences to the heart that battles oblivion within.

He had thought they were taking care of her. He’d instructed them, he’d _commanded—_

“You’re getting enough to eat?”

Her shoulders rise and fall; careless shrug, listless indifference. Food will never be inconsequential to one who wanted for it as she did but if you value something then you give them more reason to take it from you, and pretending not to care can be a shield in its own way. “More than.”

“Evidently not.”

Wary of a trap, her eyes narrow. Kylo pushes on regardless.

“How often are they feeding you?”

“Aren’t you in charge of that?”

“No, I—” he blinks, reconsiders. Snoke would never have troubled himself with something so trivial, would likely have wasted not a second thinking about whether those under his will were fed.

_I am not Snoke._

“…Indirectly.”

“Uhuh.” Unimpressed, Rey leaves him by the viewport to stew in this latest existential mire and crosses the room on silent feet to flop down on her back on the bed, one hand resting on her abdomen and the other pillowed beneath her head.

His rooms are hardly luxurious—the station had been functional even in its Imperial heyday, equipped with the bare essentials and little more—yet the dark space swallows her, and Kylo is momentarily blindsided by the sight of _Rey sprawled out on his bed like she belongs there._

The bond is a snare; seldom has that been more apparent.

“Seems to me the Supreme Emperor should know if his subjects are eating.”

The loud growl of her stomach that follows the scathing jibe seems almost accusatory.

Glowering, shielding his mind so she cannot see the slow bubbling up of shame there, Kylo stomps over to his desk on the other side of the room and jabs irritably at the comlink, hailing the guardroom down the corridor. He’d brought only a skeleton crew with him from the ship, just enough to keep things running and Rey’s presence from becoming widely known. The command corps are accustomed to the Master of Ren vanishing on clandestine, mysterious missions every now and then: let them think there’s no reason it should change now he is their master too.

He will have to return to the fleet before too long, before the fragile threads of his authority fray completely, but a voice in the back of Kylo’s head whispers insistently— _not without her._

“Sir?”

Rey’s head turns sideways at the sound of the voice, the sight of Kylo leaning over the desk doing little to dispel her confusion.

Though—how much can she see? The bond bends reality itself: only what he can touch with his own hands keeps him grounded. Rey might be wandering around his quarters like she owns them, lounging flat on her back on his bed, but how much of it can she see beyond him?

The thought makes him feel oddly naked.

Kylo grits his teeth.

“I require food for the…for our guest.”

_Fuck._

Rey arches a reproving eyebrow. One foot waggles pointedly, a reminder of her earlier threat.

“Immediately.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Is there a real ‘fresher I can use?” she enquires in a loud voice meant to carry. “I’m bleeding.”

Kylo rolls his eyes—and then hesitates, once again left stumped by the mechanics of their connection. He can see and hear Rey as clearly as if she were in the room with him, because as far as the Force is concerned she _is._ Does the same go for the ‘trooper on the other end of the channel?

Plainly, she’s hoping so.

“Of course,” he says stiffly. Then, just to show her how little success her attempts to wrong-foot him will have, he thumbs the frequency open again. “Pain suppressants, too, and a medical heat pad if we have any.”

“Right away, Sir.”

When he looks up again, Rey is gone.

**

Sakhmes is waiting when he strides into the comm. centre.

Kylo had spent most of the short walk over wondering why she hadn’t just come to find him. The knights are the only ones to whom his personal quarters have never been barred—and if he’d ever stopped to think about it he might have begun to question that, his mind ready to tie itself in knots of doubt and suspicion at the slightest provocation, but he’s never allowed himself to doubt their fealty. They had followed him into hell; this is all that matters.

Theirs is a bond of blood, if not of love. They are not family.

(Then again, if Sakhmes had decided to simply let herself into his quarters the odds that she would’ve walked in on him arguing with an empty room are considerably higher than nil, so Kylo sends a grateful prayer to the Force that this time she had called him to meet her.)

The rest of the journey had been spent thinking about Rey; more specifically, about the fact that she is apparently going hungry on his watch.

He hates feeling helpless. He _shouldn’t_ feel it. He answers to no one, now—all his monsters are conquered, his ghosts laid to rest. The Force has written him a destiny: it is his own and no one else’s to pursue.

Yet he can’t do a simple thing like keep one skinny scavenger girl fed.

 _Careless,_ he thinks bitterly. _Useless. Everything you touch, you spoil._

**

Sakhmes communicates in person via a combination of gestures and psychological suggestion, a language of her own invention comprehensible to perhaps half a dozen people outside of Mirial. She’d picked up the basics of signage from a deaf relative there in her childhood, and since refined it to an impenetrable code known only to the Ren.

It wouldn’t take a linguist to read the unease in her features now.

Kylo frowns. “Trouble?”

 _Received word from Macha,_ she replies. Then, with a grimace, _I think_.

 _You think?_ Slipping into nonverbal communication is effortless. Not having to open his mouth and risk shoving his foot in there is almost a relief.

Sakhmes nods, sharply, jerks her head towards the console and signs, _see for yourself_.

The transmissions sit waiting for him on the knights’ private comm. channel. He recognises the codes—both those of Macha Ren and of her ship, the _Vanth_. At first glance nothing seems out of the ordinary.

The back of his neck prickles with foreboding. Sakhmes would not have called him over _nothing_.

Two of the messages are over a week old, the last sent only a few days ago, yet the logs have recorded them as brand new.

“They all just came in?”

Sakhmes nods. Her fingers fly over the console, typing out a swift answer.

_Delayed by interference. Her charted course was riddled with dead zones. Blackouts were expected._

“Do you have a point of origin for them?”

 _Transponder data puts the_ Vanth’s _last known location on the edge of the Erkalla Cluster. That was nine days ago, shortly before the first holo was sent. Then there was nothing._

This last is signed with her hands: _Till now_.

“There’s a lot of dead space in that sector. A backlog isn’t unusual.”

_They aren’t all backlog._

More than her terse responses, it is what Sakhmes _isn’t_ saying that fills Kylo with the greatest sense of unease.

He leans in over her shoulder to read the screen, hoping that she has simply gained a taste for melodrama.

_Show me._

**

The first transmission had been sent nine standard days ago, Macha’s last contact before the _Vanth_ headed into the dark. It is, as expected, nothing more than the ship’s coordinates at time of sending and a short update on their projected course. They had made better time than anticipated, the knight declared: she would be unreachable by comm. within a cycle.

“Sooner than,” murmurs Kylo.

Sakhmes hums in agreement.

The second message was dispatched a day later, as the ship made its way into the Erkalla Cluster and the coronal storms that batter its outer regions unrelentingly. It is a mess of distortion and fragmented visuals, Macha’s striking features broken and blurred by interference.

 _“—hope this reaches you,”_ she is saying. _“Karking storms got us as soon as we passed the Scylla. We’ll be lucky to make it to the Sea of Ghosts in the next two standards once—clear the Shadow Mire.”_

She hadn’t known, then, that the dead zone had already silenced the ship, and nothing would escape until the _Vanth_ made it out the other side.

_“—you don’t—from me in a week, consider it my fucking mayday.”_

Kylo snorts. Macha has never been the most assiduous of the knights when it comes to her mission logs (much to his eternal exasperation), preferring to disappear for months at a time and cobble together some kind of half-assed report on her return, so this is already somewhat more contact than he had expected. Her flickering aspect is visibly tired and irritable, scowling into the recorder as if it’s personally offended her—which it promptly does, by cutting her off mid-sentence in a crackle of static.

“None of this seems unusual,” murmurs Kylo, peering over the top of Sakhmes’ head. She flaps one hand at him as if to say _hold your fathiers_ and calls up the final holo.

Macha looks much as she had in the previous holo, dark eyes fierce and her customary scowl in place. It was sent six days after, though, and the longer Kylo listens to it the colder his blood runs.

 _“—hope this reaches you,”_ Macha tells them, her intonation almost identical to before. _“Storms got us as soon as we passed the Scylla. Force willing, we should make it to the Sea of Ghosts within two standards.”_

“What—” Kylo starts, only for Sakhmes to raise her hand again to silence him.

 _“—rough sailing, but everything is fine—”_ Macha flashes a dead-eyed grin at the recorder. _“Fine as can be. My shipmates are a strange lot. I barely sleep for—their singing.”_ Her features grow a little distant, as if she can hear it even now. _“This is a strange place, too. Vapour lagoons and whispering nebulae. Taps—like dancing along our hull in the small hours. You’d like it, Kylo. Perhaps you—come instead—”_

Sakhmes’ index finger hovers over her console screen as, with another jarring crackle, the transmission goes dead.

_This one left its point of origin thirty-eight hours ago._

Not even two standards. Kylo swallows back the uneasy knot in his throat. “What happened in the six days between transmissions?”

_Per astrogation data she should have crossed into the Sea of Ghosts seven days ago, accounting for storm delays._

“Which—according to the second message—is what happened. More or less.”

_Yes._

“So…could she have sent another message, a duplicate, believing the original had been lost?”

 _Maybe._ The look on Sakhmes’ face suggests otherwise. _Doesn’t explain why she would report entering the Sea nearly a week after doing so. Or…the rest of it._

No, thinks Kylo grimly. Very little about this makes any kind of sense.

_Not like her to make contact at all. Never mind three times._

Sakhmes’ instincts aren’t often misguided, and she is plainly skirting around saying something outright.

“Speak your mind,” he commands softly.

 _The transmissions all came from the_ Vanth. _That much is certain._

As an assessment of the facts it is both straightforward and uncharacteristically evasive. It falls to him to fill in the gaps.

“They came from the ship,” he echoes quietly, his mind moving from one explanation to another and each one more unnerving than the last. The cold inside him turns slowly to outright dread; Kylo grips the back of Sakhmes’ chair in both hands tight enough that he can hear his gloves straining about the knuckles as she lifts her own and completes the thought for him.

_I don’t think they all came from Macha._

**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> love to vanessa and larissa, and dot for the shouting <3


	5. siren in my dark.

The rough pads of her fingertips catch on his hair each time she draws her hand through it, letting her blunt nails scrape lightly across his scalp.

Her hands have known work, have known hardship and hurt as much as the rest of her. They are scarred, and weathered by the sun, like the rest of her.

He turns his head and feels the slight chafe of her trousers under his cheek. She smells of dry earth and sweat and ozone, something familiar and alien all at once; a strange, wondrous galaxy overflowing from beneath her skin.

Slowly, Kylo comes to the realisation that he is naked.

Some detached part of him flinches in token humiliation. His body curls inwards, shrinking into itself in anticipation of the shame, the bitter self-loathing which has been instilled in him since he was a boy by the voice that whispered in his mind he was odd, he was broken, he was _ugly,_ until he could no longer look at his own reflection without revulsion. It _hurts_ to be so exposed, the vulnerability of it manifests as near-physical pain—heat crawling across his skin and the dull ache at the base of his skull, a mortification of the flesh as sure as if her hands were whips and blades.

Her mind moves soothingly over his, her touch unrelenting, and slowly the prickling heat of disgust ebbs and leaves only a raw kind of peace. Kylo brings a hand up to wrap over her knee, the rest of him bending around her until he is as close as he can get. It’s not enough—not when he would discard his skin and climb under hers if he could and if he closes his eyes he can almost imagine it: tucked inside her, seeing through her eyes the light to which his own are blind.

Her fingers comb ceaselessly through his hair. He does not deserve her gentleness. He hurts her, even when he’s trying not to, even when he wants so much to be kind; he ruins everything he touches and he doesn’t know how to stop. His mind _begs_ him now to get up before she comes to her senses and rejects him (because she will, she _must,_ everyone does in the end), but where the spirit is strong the flesh is weak and his resists, traitorous, too starved for touch and the simple wordless grace she administers with her careworn hands.

Then she starts to sing.

 _Where did you learn that?_ Kylo wants to ask, as the lullaby with which his mother would sing him to sleep fills his ears and his heart with the heavy cloak of memory, but he cannot get the words out. His lips refuse to obey him, refuse to move at all, and when he pushes his tongue past his teeth to try and lick the numbness away he finds with a shock of cold dread that he can’t. His lips are sealed, stoppered like a drum.

Kylo goes rigid, a cry of horror wrenched from his chest and muffled by the skin covering his mouth, only—

_He has no mouth._

Rey does, and it is full of many sharp teeth that gleam in the dark when she leans over him, her lips pulled taut in a rictus grin and her eyes black with hunger as she scrapes the hair back from his face to better reach his throat.

**

He wakes with a choked cry, the iron tang of fear on his tongue and his heart hammering fit to burst out of his chest.

The room is cold. _He_ is cold, dizzy and shaking and clammy all over, and at the first attempt to pull some air into his lungs and centre himself Kylo’s mind near whites out with terror because he _can’t_ —he can’t draw breath, can’t even move his jaw to try.

_It wasn’t a nightmare at all._

The scream is already halfway out of him when his addled mind belatedly pieces together that he’s been sleeping on his stomach, and the suffocating sensation is only his face pressed into the pillow.

Groaning, Kylo rolls onto his back.

The dream lingers in his mind. It had seemed so real, so vivid in its simplicity and the quiet unfolding of horror, Rey’s voice and hands soft as the night as she sang to him of melancholy and memory. And then—

He shivers, haunted by the ravenous emptiness in her eyes.

Then he freezes.

Something breathes in the darkness nearby, a thin, shallow rattle like a creature clinging to life.

Adrenaline spikes for a second time along his spine. Kylo twists toward the sound, thrusting out a hand behind him—his saber sails into his grasp and ignites in the same instant, grisly light bleeding into the furthest corners of the room, and in the explosion of scarlet fire he can just make out the small, amorphous shape huddled on the other side of the bed.

His heart louder than cannonfire in his ears, gradually his eyes adjust until he can make out the form of Rey atop his sheets.

She sleeps like a stone, her arms and knees tucked protectively into her body as if to fend off some imagined threat. In rest the perpetual sadness that shrouds her recedes, the little furrow between her eyebrows smoothed away—she looks almost serene, Kylo thinks, with the small corner of his brain _not_ tripping over itself at the improbable reality of _here_ and _bed_ and _her;_ her countenance untroubled, her hair fanned out over the pillow like some cursed maiden in a story.

She is so still, so pale. The only sign he has that she even lives are those terrible, rasping breaths.

Abruptly conscious of how it would look were she to wake, Kylo lowers his lightsaber. Slowly, the room comes into sharper focus around him and with it the awareness of his own senses—of the sheets tangled around his middle, the chill of drying sweat on his back and thighs and the stale taste in his mouth, the faint drone of the station’s life support systems humming away in the background.

And the scavenger girl, fast asleep next to him.

“Rey,” he tries.

Beneath her eyelids he perceives subtle movement. Can she hear him? Or does she dream?

_“Rey.”_

Are her dreams anything like his?

She stirs, then, and he dares not touch her but she is so _close,_ he can make out every freckle and mark down to the scar on her right cheek and another nearly lost in her hairline, and it’s been so long since he was free to just— _look_ at her.

(It’s not free, not really, every moment he spends memorising her features is stolen and has been from the very first when he stole _her_ —nothing like this was never meant for him, good things in his hands come only to ruin but he can’t help leaning just a little bit closer; can’t help but delude himself that this is _real_.)

A soft mumble leaves her lips. Kylo jerks back just in time to watch her eyes fly open and find his—Rey draws a sharp breath and then she’s gone, just like that, and he is alone again, more deeply shaken by the fleeting glimpse of fear in her gaze than anything else he’s witnessed tonight.

Slowly, hesitantly, he reaches out a trembling hand.

The other side of the bed is cold where she had lain.

**


End file.
